Yesterday Vincent Harding died. He was a beloved friend of Phyllis’ and mine, and an extraordinary gentle, persistent, clear, loving, and prophetic voice for justice in America and in the world.

In Jewish tradition we may say of some great human beings, Tzaddikzichrono l’vrakha, which I understand as “The memory of this inwardly-just and justice-seeking person [“tzaddik” from “tzedek”] is a blessing.” Vincent’s life is, and his memory will be, indeed a blessing. As another tradition says, “Vincent Harding,Presente!” -- Still present within us.

He died at 5:11 Monday afternoon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

He had been there for ten days, beginning with an aneurism near his heart. He was in Philadelphia with his wife Aljosie because they had been teaching at Pendle Hill, the Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia.

Vincent went through three operations in the last week, seemed to have come through them all right, and then suddenly lost blood pressure and died minutes later.

He was 83.

Phyllis and I had visited him in the hospital Saturday before last, and — characteristically for him — he (in a hospital bed facing super-major surgery!) asked after our health even before we could ask how he was feeling.

Also characteristically, he laughed as we talked about his having been helicoptered from the first hospital where he went with chest pain -- one very near Pendle Hill -- to HUP for better treatment than the first could provide. “First time I’ve been in a helicopter since the Army in World War II!”

We picked up Aljosie at the hospital an hour ago, and she is staying with us today. We spent time talking last night about our loss, our grief, and our love.

Phyllis and I met Vincent at the first gathering of The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah (Jews, Christians, and Muslims learning and taking action together after 9/11). . He spoke at those gatherings slowly, always listening carefully to others before he spoke, and then with calm and loving wisdom.

He spoke the same way when he and Aljosie took part in our Passover Seder a few years ago – and on the telephone meetings of the steering committee of the Council of Elders – and at the Heschel-King Festival at Mishkan Shalom in January 2013 where he spoke in deeply moving spiritual unfolding of what Dr. King might be doing now – and what we could be doing now.

We fell in loving awe of him at that first Tent of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah, and have worked with him since in many ways.

We asked him to write a chapter for our book Freedom Journeys on the meanings of the biblical Exodus and Wilderness stories across millennia – a chapter on the presence of the Exodus in Southern Black Christian culture. He wrote a wonderful essay especially on how Exodus pervaded Black sings from slavery days till the Freedom Movement. (He called it “the Black-led multiracial Freedom Movement,” not limited to “civil rights” or racial justice.)

And he never left that Movement. Through his writing and teaching he kept it alive. As he said again and again, it was and is the constant struggle to renew and expand democracy – against all the forces of domination and destruction.

When we saw him in the hospital he said that at Pendle Hill he had begun work toward an autobiography. It would have been a profoundly important gift to us all of a life well and fully lived.

He and his first wife Rosemarie (who died ten years ago) moved to Atlanta in 1960 to join the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- and in that work he became a close comrade and occasional first-draft-writer of some of Dr. King’s speeches (especially the most profound of them, the Riverside Church speech of April 4, 1967, to Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam). (Scroll down for text and audio of Dr. King's "Beyond Vietnam speech.)

Vincent was insistent that the wisdom that came from the struggles of the mid-century must be kept alive and newly living by contact between the elders of that movement and the far younger activists of today.

To that end he founded the Veterans of Hope project at Iliffe University in Denver, where he also taught for more than twenty years as Professor of Religion and Social Transformation. And with the same intention, he was a co-founder of the National Council of Elders. It would have been a profoundly important gift to us all of a life well and fully lived.

And it was not just the USA. Two years ago, he and Aljosie joined with Dorothy Cotton, another veteran of the Freedom Movement, and Rabbi Brian Walt on a journey to meet with nonviolent Palestinian freedom-struggle activists in the Occupied West Bank.

And he wrote with the same hope, to transmit old experience into new minds and hearts: Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero;Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement; We Must Keep Going: Martin Luther King and the Future of America; There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America

One year ago today, Vincent asked Aljosie to marry him. That was after four years of loving companionship. I am glad that they found joy in each other.

He put his whole heart into love and justice – and in the end his heart gave out.

In sorrow for his death and joyful celebration of his life --Arthur

(Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center is a close personal friend of Dr. Harding and an IMAC Steering Committee member.)